who is a survivor? child holocaust survivors and · children of survivors in the largest event of...

Rebecca Clifford, “Who is a survivor? Child Holocaust Survivors and the Development of a Generational Identity,” Oral History Forum d’histoire orale 36 (2016).

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Who is a survivor? Child Holocaust Survivors and the Development of a Generational Identity

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Rebecca Clifford, Swansea University

Abstract: In April 1983, the first American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust

Survivors brought together thousands of adult survivors, child survivors, and

children of survivors in the largest event of its kind ever held. This article

explores the role of the Gathering in establishing a sense of generational

belonging for child Holocaust survivors: encounters at the Gathering forced child

survivors to confront their relationship with the concept of the “survivor”, and it

was only after the Gathering that the term “child survivor” entered widespread

usage, and the first support groups for child survivors formed. Using oral history

collected at the Gathering, in combination with interviews conducted in the late

1980s and early 1990s, the article explores how events such as the Gathering can

have a catalytic effect on the development of a generational consciousness. It

argues that the construction of generational identities hinges not (or not only) on

the formative events of youth, but on an active process of engaging with and

narrating a sense of generational belonging that can take place much later in the

life cycle. It posits that child survivors only began to see themselves as a distinct

group when – in the historical moment of the 1980s – they could locate their

experiences in a broader story about who constituted a survivor.

I once had the experience at a conference of speaking with a fellow historian of

modern Europe, a colleague some decades my senior, about my research on child

Holocaust survivors. “Oh,” she said, “but they aren’t real survivors – they weren’t

in the camps.” Even putting aside for a moment the fact that some of the former

children who have shared their stories with me had been camp inmates, I was

dumbfounded by her comment: it struck me as suggesting a reductive and

ahistorical reading of what it meant to survive the genocide. It was only after this

exchange that I began to think that our different visions of who constituted a

survivor might say more about the generational space between us than anything

else. In 2016, we have come to take a broad view of who can be seen as a

Holocaust survivor: all those who, because of their Jewish origins, were faced

with the threat of murder by the Nazis and their collaborators before and during

1 The author wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the British

Academy/Leverhulme Trust, which funded the research for this article. I also

wish to thank my two research assistants, Genevieve George and Matthew

Worrall, and the two anonymous readers who provided such insightful and helpful

comments.


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World War II – but lived – are now seen as survivors. This includes not only

those who survived concentration camps, but also those who survived in other

ways: by hiding, by passing as Aryan, by fleeing to safer zones, by joining the

partisans. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) defines a

Holocaust survivor as “any persons, Jewish or non-Jewish, who were displaced,

persecuted, or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social, and

political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945”2 –

thus widening the definition beyond Europe’s Jewish population, indisputably the

Holocaust’s chief target.

Such wide readings did not always exist. As my colleague at the

conference suggested, there was once a time when, in the absence of an

authoritative definition of a Holocaust survivor, a survivor was presupposed to be

a camp survivor. This was not, perhaps, the case in the immediate post-war

period, when efforts to provide aid for the “surviving remnant” of Europe’s Jewry

often focused on helping survivor children.3 However, in the 1960s and 1970s, as

public interest in and knowledge of the genocide began to grow, a link between

the concept of the survivor and the experience of the camps became entrenched,

aided by a number of factors: coverage of the testimony that camp survivors gave

at the 1961 Eichmann trial, the re-circulation of images of the concentration

camps in the public sphere, the growing interest in literature by prominent camp

survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and the accessibility of cultural

products such as the widely-seen 1978 television miniseries Holocaust – to name

2 See the USHMM website for the definition:

http://www.ushmm.org/remember/the-holocaust-survivors-and-victims-resource-

center/survivors-and-victims [accessed 1 November 2016]. The inclusivity of the

USHMM’s definition was the result of debates, sometimes bitter and always

political, that preceded its opening in 1993. On the issue of non-Jewish survivors

and the history of the museum, see Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory:

The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking, 1995),

114-23. 3 On humanitarian aid to surviving children in the early postwar period, and on

the symbolic, political, and ideological dimensions of this project, see especially

Daniella Doron, Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2015), and Tara Zahra, The Lost Children:

Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Boston: Harvard

University Press, 2011). Hasia Diner also touches on aid to children in her work

We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence

after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009),

150-215.


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only a few of the “vectors of memory” that shaped public perspectives at the

time.4

For those who had survived outside of the concentration camps, this

tendency to equate “survivor” with “camp survivor” could complicate an

individual’s relationship with her own past: if she was not a “survivor”, how far

did her experiences “count”, either within her family and community, or in the

broader public arena? This dilemma was particularly acute for children who had

avoided murder in the Holocaust. Only 11% of Europe’s Jewish children survived

the genocide (compared to an overall survival rate of approximately 33%). Of this

remnant, comparatively few survived the concentration camps; most survived by

hiding or being hidden by adults who took risks to protect them.5 Many emerged

from hiding at the end of the war to find themselves orphaned and without family

or homes. Yet before the 1980s, the term “child survivor” did not exist. Children

who had lost both parents in the genocide were commonly referred to as “Jewish

war orphans”. For those who still had one or both parents, there was no

meaningful identity label for the experience of confusion, terror, and loss,

emotions that had often deeply marked their formative years.6

4 On the Eichmann trial and its impact on public “memory”, see Annette

Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). On

the growing use of images of the camps in the public sphere in the 1960s and

1970s, see Habbo Knoch, “The Return of Images: Photographs of Nazi Crimes

and the West German Public in the ‘Long 1960s’,” in Coping with the Nazi Past:

West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955-1975, ed.

Philipp Gassert and Alan E. Steinweis (Oxford: Berghahn, 2006), 31-49. On the

impact of the miniseries Holocaust, see Jeffrey Shandler, While America

Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999),

155-78. 5 The best scholarly work on children in the Holocaust – survivors and victims –

remains Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 6 To date, there has been very little work by historians on child Holocaust

survivors. The academic research that does exist has been carried out almost

exclusively by psychologists and psychoanalysts, who began, in the 1980s, to

write about the long-term impacts of child survivors’ wartime experiences – right

at the moment that child survivors themselves began to forge a collective identity.

The two processes were most certainly inter-related. Of these scholars, the most

prominent was psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg, who largely pioneered the field

and was known internationally for her work with child survivors. See in particular

Judith Kestenberg and Ira Brenner, eds., The Last Witness: The Child Survivor of

the Holocaust (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1996), and Judith


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This changed only in the 1980s, when child survivors had entered their

middle age. There are many reasons for this change. The remarkable expansion of

public interest in the Holocaust in this period prompted some child survivors to

revisit their childhood experiences and begin to re-think the role these experiences

played in their adult lives and identities. Demographic shifts were also a

motivator; in particular, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, children with at least

one parent who had survived the war began to witness their survivor parents

entering old age, becoming ill and dying – and this, too, had the potential to bring

them towards a moment of reckoning with their own memories. Alongside these

slowly unfolding forces was a ground-breaking event that proved to be catalytic

for many child Holocaust survivors, particularly (but not exclusively) those living

in North America. This event was the first American Gathering of Jewish

Holocaust Survivors, a four-day conference that took place in April 1983 in

Washington, DC, timed to coincide with the 40th

anniversary of the Warsaw

Ghetto Uprising. This event attracted roughly 16,000 survivors and their families,

including an estimated 2400 child survivors.7 The importance of the Gathering,

beyond the fact that it was the largest meeting of survivors ever held8, was that it

Kestenberg and Eva Fogelman, eds., Children During the Nazi Reign:

Psychological Perspectives on the Interview Process (New York: Praeger, 1994). 7 16,000 participants were estimated to have attended the Gathering overall,

although up to 30,000 people attended the public events in the evenings. See Mike

Feinsilber, “16,000 Survivors with 16,000 Stories,” Associated Press, 12 April

1983. The estimate of 2400 child survivors is my own, based on a careful reading

of the 32 folders (comprising thousands of pages) of written personal testimony

collected at the Gathering, and now housed in the archives of the USHMM

(Record Group 02.002, “American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

collection”), as well as on the oral testimony collected at the Gathering (USHMM,

Record Group 50-119, “American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors oral

history collection”, and USHMM, Record Group RG-50.477, “Oral history

interviews of the Bay Area Oral History Project”). Child survivors produced

roughly fifteen percent of this written testimony, and thirteen percent of the oral

testimony, giving an estimate of 2000-2400 child survivor attendees. However, as

this paper argues, because many child survivors in attendance felt uncertain about

whether they could in fact call themselves survivors, some may well have held

back from providing testimony; if this was the case, we can assume the actual

number to be higher. 8 A similar event – the first World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors – had

been held in Jerusalem in 1981. However, the Jerusalem Gathering was

considerably smaller than the Washington one, and does not appear to have had


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brought together three generations of people who were, in different capacities,

grappling with the meaning of the term “survivor”: the generation who had lived

through the genocide as adults, who were largely survivors of concentration

camps and ghettos; the generation of child survivors who had predominantly lived

in hiding during the war; and a “second generation” of children born after the war

to survivor parents.9 These three generational groups had had few such large, such

meaningful, or such public interactions before the early 1980s, and as each group

brought a different interpretation of the long-term legacies of survival to the table,

the event became a seminal moment in which collective identities were

challenged and transformed. For child survivors in particular, it was a key event

in the establishment of what would become, by the mid-1980s, a distinct

generational identity across the Anglo-American world, in countries in which

child survivors were both immigrants and members of a religious minority.

Following the 1983 Gathering, groups for child survivors began to mushroom

throughout the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and beyond, and the term

“child survivor” itself came into use in English.10

This article will explore the remarkable ways in which the 1983 Gathering

brought generational hierarchies of experience into sharp focus, and the

consequences of this for memory and identity between and across generations. It

will, moreover, explore how oral history can shed a particularly valuable light on

the ways in which generational identities are socially constructed, both in the

historical moment of a watershed event such as the Gathering, and in its wake.

Because organisers of the Gathering hoped that the event would play a

the dramatic impact on the identities of child survivors that the 1983 Gathering

did. 9 Many in the “adult” cohort were nonetheless young – in their late teens and

early twenties – at the time of their liberation. Thus “adult” and “child” survivors

(and, indeed, children of survivors) might be no more than a few years apart in

age. There is a tendency, in both popular and some scholarly literature on

“generations”, to use “generation” interchangeably with “age cohort”, but in this

case the two concepts are clearly not synonymous. 10

This trajectory was not necessarily paralleled elsewhere. For example, in

France, the Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France (Sons and Daughters of

Deported Jews of France), a prominent organization run by child survivors who

had lost one or both parents to deportation, was founded officially in 1979, but

traced its roots to earlier activism linked to the mass social movements of the late

1960s. On this see Rebecca Clifford, “Child Survivors, Generations, and Memory

in post-1968 France”, forthcoming. I am not currently aware of any similar

research exploring the development of a “child survivor” identity in Israel, but

such an exploration would be timely.


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documentary and archival role, participants were encouraged to give written and

oral testimony regarding their wartime experiences. In addition to a written

collection of thousands of testimonies, volunteers at the event collected over 320

interviews with participants, of which more than forty were with child survivors.11

This article uses oral history both to tap into this pivotal moment of

subjective generational identity formation, but also to consider how child

survivors later reflected on this moment and accounted for its significance in their

individual and collective life trajectories.12

The Gathering produced a unique oral

history collection that allows us to capture a snapshot of generational identity in

formation and in flux, but this material is even more revealing when it is

combined with later testimony reflecting on the event. The article thus further

draws on eighteen interviews conducted after the Gathering with child survivors

who had participated in the event, taken from two of the largest and most

important Holocaust-related oral history collections: the Yale Fortunoff Video

Archive for Holocaust Testimony, and the Shoah Foundation Visual History

Archive. In addition, five of these later interviews were conducted with

individuals who also gave recorded testimony at the Gathering in 1983; while

small in number, this handful of interviews offers a rare opportunity to see how

individuals analysed such processes of identity formation for themselves, and

situated them within their own life trajectories and narratives.

This has implications for some of the central issues that scholars debate

regarding generations, memory, and oral history. Scholars of generations contest

the extent to which “generations” are defined by formative events that occur in

youth, or by social and subjective processes of identity construction. As this

article shows, oral history is a marvellous vehicle for demonstrating that

formative events in and of themselves may not be enough. In the case studied

here, for nearly forty years child survivors shared a powerful set of formative

experiences without having established a concurrent sense of generational identity

as “child survivors”. It was only in the 1980s, in a historical moment when public

interest in the Holocaust began to expand rapidly, that this was to change. This

developing generational identity was relational as well as historical: child

11

Here I have regarded an interviewee as a child survivor if the interviewee

defined him or herself as a child at the time of liberation. The interviews are

housed in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 157 interviews can be

found in the collection catalogued as RG-50.119, and an additional 170 are held

in the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project (copies of which are held in the

USHMM in the collection catalogued as RG-50.477). 12

For a useful history of the Fortunoff and Shoah Foundation collections, see

Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2015), ch.s 1 and 3 respectively.


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survivors began to think of themselves as a distinct group precisely because they

increasingly saw that they did not belong to the “generation” of adult survivors,

nor to the “generation” of children of survivors. Furthermore, at the moment that

these different groups were each working to position themselves in relation to the

concept of survival, the very narrative of what and who a survivor could be was

becoming more fluid. If we accept, as Margaret R. Somers argues, that identity

formation is closely linked to narrative patterns, then we can see “that stories

guide action; that people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by

locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories;

[and] that ‘experience’ is constituted through narratives.”13

It was not enough for

child survivors to share formative events in their childhoods; they only

collectively began to see themselves as survivors in their own right at a historical

moment in which they could locate themselves in a broader story about what

constituted survival, and who constituted a survivor.

The formation of a distinct generational identity for child survivors was

thus linked to contextual changes such as demographic shifts and new mnemonic

practices, but by the same token it was a subjective and social construction. Not

all children who survived the Holocaust would have identified with the term

“child survivor”, then or now. The new term was informed by a political and

agentive argument: it was a means of making sense of life trajectories, a way of

positioning individual experiences within a changing public memory, and a way

of approaching new narratives of what survival itself meant. The formative events

of the 1940s provided a common background for those who adopted the term

“child survivor”, but it was the context of the 1980s, not the 1940s, that gave

these child survivors an actively shared sense of generational belonging.

Methodologically, historic oral history collections shed a unique light on

this process. Interviewees can literally speak to us from a moment of change

itself. In the interview collection created at the Gathering in 1983, we can “hear” a

collective story emerging of individuals re-evaluating their life histories in the

face of social change. By then drawing on reflections in later interviews (and here

this paper uses historic collections created largely in the late 1980s and through

the 1990s), we can chart the steps that interviewees have taken towards a

subjectively understood sense of generational belonging. Historic oral history

collections illuminate this path in a way that few other documents do – and thus

this paper also argues that oral historians should not be shy of making greater use

of these collections.

What is a generation?

13

Margaret R. Somers, “The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and

network approach,” Theory and Society, 23 (1994), 614.


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As many scholars have noted, “generation” is a slippery term. Alistair Thomson

argues that, in its popular usage, the term is often “crude and ahistorical”, offering

“little historical analysis as to how a generation is formed apart from the

coincidence of birth, and no theory about how generational consciousness might

be sustained over time through individual memory and in relation to collective

representation and remembering of shared experiences and characteristics.”14

Scholarly interpretations of the concept are no less fraught. As Alan Spitzer wrote

in a seminal 1973 article on the question of how historians might best utilize the

concept, the very ambiguity of the term meant that historians should use it with

some caution, probing “whether, and in what respects, age-related differences

mattered in a given historical situation.”15

Across the social sciences, most scholars interested in generations draw on

the theoretical work of sociologist Karl Mannheim, whose early twentieth-century

studies of the sociology of knowledge included a consideration of the “problem of

generations”. Mannheim argued that the issue of generations needed to be

approached sociologically, emphasizing the shared mentalité of generations as

well as their ability to act on collective social understandings, but it also needed to

be approached historically and experientially, stressing that members of a

generation share “a common location in the historical dimension of the social

process.”16

His work thus suggests that the issue of generations sits at an

intriguing crossroads between the micro world of biography and the macro world

of historical events, an area of confluence that is also central to the work of oral

historians. However, Mannheim’s view of generations took the question of

subjective consciousness only so far. As Karen Foster has argued, Mannheim did

not see the active development of a shared consciousness as necessary to the

formation of a “generation”; rather, she writes, Mannheim posited that

generations “were expressed as a sort of accidental harmony, different notes

struck at the same time…summing up the ‘spirit’ of people close in age in

particular time and place.”17

14

Alistair Thomson, “Australian Generations? Transformative Events, Memory

and Generational Identity,” in Michael Bőss (ed.), Conflicted Pasts and National

Identities: Composing Narratives of War and Division (Aarhus: Aarhus

University Press, 2014). 15

Alan B. Spitzer, “The Historical Problem of Generations,” American Historical

Review, 78:5 (December 1973), 1354. 16

Karl Mannheim, “Essay on the problem of generations,” in K. Mannheim,

Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1952), 276-322. 17

Karen Foster, Generation, discourse, and social change (New York: Routledge,

2013), 15.


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Recent scholarship has critiqued Mannheim’s classic work on a number of

points: Mannheim has been criticized for privileging political events over social

or cultural ones as formative experiences, for focusing on a male elite, and for

neglecting the roles of popular culture and of the mass media in the creation of

shared generational identities. However, the most significant recent criticism of

Mannheim’s work has pivoted on the question of how far generational

consciousness is actively developed. Work such as that of sociologists June

Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner interprets generations as actively formed and

consciously maintained, a “self-conscious age stratum…[that has] a collective

ideology and a set of integrating rituals.”18

Borrowing from Benedict Anderson,

Anna von der Goltz argues that this new scholarship sees generations “as

‘imagined communities’ in which individuals find a symbolic home. The

cognitive and social binding forces of talking about generation have thus moved

to the forefront of scholarly concern.”19

In other words, scholars increasingly

understand the construction of generational identities in terms of the work that

goes into forming a subjective shared consciousness, making generation

formation a far more active process than Mannheim originally envisaged. This

article follows this recent trend in scholarship, exploring how and why

generational identity develops in a given historical context, and viewing this

identity as something that is actively and subjectively formed and consciously

maintained over time.

In the world of Holocaust studies, there has been a certain amount of

engagement with the concept of generation via the ample scholarship on the

“second generation” – the children of Holocaust survivors – but very little on

child survivors. In a 2002 essay, literary scholar Susan Rubin Suleiman

challenged scholars to rethink the place of generations in our understanding of the

Holocaust and its memory by defining child survivors as the “1.5 generation”,

18

June Edmunds and Bryan S. Turner, Generations, Culture and Society

(Buckingham, Open University Press, 2002), 12. For other scholarship in this

vein, see Mark Roseman, “Introduction: Generation conflict and German history,

1770-1968”, in Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and

Generation Formation in Germany, 1770-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995), 1-46, and Bernd Weisbrod, ‘Cultures of Change:

Generations in the Politics and Memory of Modern Germany’, in Stephen Lovell

(ed.), Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007),

19-35. There is also an excellent overview of this recent research in Anna von der

Goltz, “introduction”, in Anna von der Goltz (ed.), “Talkin’ ‘bout my

generation”: Conflicts of generation building and Europe’s ‘1968’ (Göttingen,

Wallstein Verlag, 2011), 1-22. 19

Anna von der Goltz, “introduction”, 15.


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“too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them,

but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews.”20

Drawing on Mannheim’s theories, Suleiman argues that child survivors shared a

particular experience which in turn created aspects of a generational identity: they

experienced the trauma of the Holocaust “before the formation of stable identity

that we associate with adulthood, and in some cases before any conscious sense of

self.”21

She suggests that the common currency of their identity and experience as

child survivors might be the shared questions they have asked themselves about

their childhood experiences, the stories they have told themselves to explain these

early events, and the collective adjustments they may have had to make, both

during the war and in the years since, to process their memories.

Suleiman also rightly asks readers to consider who is a “child” in this

context. This is an important question, because there is no clear and agreed-upon

definition of “childhood”, just as there is no ready definition of “generation”.

Definitions of childhood are historically and culturally contingent, and in

particular, understandings of the point at which childhood ends (age 12, age 14,

age 16, or age 18) have changed dramatically over time. Younger children

remember events differently from older children. How comparable are the

experiences and memories of a child under five with those of a child who has

entered puberty? Suleiman argues that, in looking at the “1.5 generation”, scholars

should consider three distinct age categories: children who were too young to

remember (infancy to age 3); children who were “old enough to remember but too

young to understand” (roughly ages 4 to 10); and children who were “old enough

to understand but too young to be responsible” (approximately ages 11 to14).22

Although I agree with Suleiman’s notion of distinct age categories, I have taken a

somewhat different approach in this paper: in keeping with a subjective

understanding of generational identity, I have seen as “child survivors” those who

defined themselves as children during the war in their interviews. The vast

majority of these were born between 1930 and 1944, so the oldest were no older

than fifteen at the time of the liberation in 1945.

As suggested by Suleiman’s term “1.5 generation” itself, there is a strong

element of positionality here. By calling child survivors the “1.5 generation”,

Suleiman reminds us that child survivors themselves often feel sandwiched

between – and to a certain extent silenced by – the generation of their parents, and

the generation of children of survivors born after the war, who by the early 1980s

had begun to form their own support groups and to refer to themselves as the

20

Susan Rubin Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors

and the Holocaust,” American Imago, 59:3 (2002), 277-295, here 277. 21

Suleiman, “1.5 Generation,” 277. 22

Suleiman, “1.5 Generation,” 283.


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“second generation” or the “generation after”.23

In many ways, this is precisely

what made the 1983 Gathering fascinating: by bringing members of these three

“generations” together in such large numbers, the event demonstrated, at least to

child survivors themselves, that they neither fit into the “first” generation, nor into

the emerging “second”. We can thus regard the event (and the subsequent

formation of a network of child survivor support groups) as catalyzing a sense of

generational consciousness.

Of course, child survivors who attended the Gathering had always had a

common experience of having survived the war, generally in hiding, separated

from parents, siblings, and other family members. However, if before the

Gathering, participants likely saw these experiences in personal and familial

terms, following the Gathering this became part of a collective experience of

reconsidering who a “survivor” could be. At the Gathering, child survivor

participants questioned whether they could call themselves “survivors” at all. In

its wake they adopted the term, and began to use narratives of survival to frame

their own life stories. Moreover, in establishing the first groups for child

survivors, they helped to spread this new understanding far beyond the relatively

small number of child survivor participants in the Gathering.

The 1983 American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

The 1983 Gathering took place both in a specific American cultural and

geographical context, and in a specific historical moment with regards to

Holocaust memory, one in which popular and scholarly interest in the genocide

was rapidly expanding while Holocaust denial was also flourishing.24

As the

genocide increasingly became the subject of films, novels, and other cultural

products in the United States and indeed globally, observers worried that the mass

murder of Europe’s Jews was both poorly understood, and increasingly trivialised.

As one commentator noted in the Washington Post in the lead-up to the

conference, the event had a particular role to play in a country so far from Europe:

“This is another continent, another generation – a new world. The swastika is

recycled as a punk button; Auschwitz is a metaphor. And Holocaust is a series on

TV.”25

23

On the development of this “second generation” identity, see Arlene Stein,

Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust

Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 24

See Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London:

Bloomsbury, 2001). 25

Charles Fenyvesi, “‘The trick is to remember and to forget’: Surviving the

Holocaust,” reprinted in The Obligation to Remember (Washington, D.C.: The


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Demographic shifts were also underway that were changing the nature of

Holocaust remembrance in North America and beyond. Adult survivors of the

concentration camps were aging. As noted above, some children of survivors –

calling themselves the “second generation” – were beginning to play a distinct

and important role in remembrance and commemoration activities, and were in

the midst, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of evaluating the role of their

parents’ pasts in their own identities. The organisers of the Gathering were keenly

aware that they were working within a moment of significant demographic

change. As Benjamin Meed, the event’s chief organiser, observed in months

leading up to the Gathering, “many of us are getting older, and there is a feeling

that the hour is late, that we must bring our story to the world in a collective

way.”26

Other organisers noted that the Gathering was to act “as a preparation for

a time when there will no longer be living witnesses to those events.”27

The organisers themselves had largely experienced the war as young

adults. Benjamin Meed had been in his early twenties when he was forced into

slave labour in the Warsaw Ghetto, and then joined the Polish Jewish

underground. Others on the central organisation committee had similarly been in

their late teens and early twenties at the start of the war; several had fought in the

resistance, and most had survived either the Warsaw Ghetto or the concentration

camps.28

In the early 1980s, they were chiefly in their 60s, and thus were

motivated by an awareness that survivors of their age cohorts were entering old

age. The organisers hoped that the Gathering would be an opportunity not just to

bear witness collectively, but also, as an editorialist in the Washington Post

commented, to show that “the Holocaust was real and not, as some revisionist

historians have postulated, an exaggeration or the product of someone’s

imagination.”29

The Gathering was also taking place in the specific context of the

development of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In March 1983,

the federal government had confirmed that two buildings adjacent to the National

Mall had been earmarked for the museum, and one of the central events that took

Washington Post, 1983), 38. The writer refers here to the miniseries Holocaust,

aired on U.S. television in 1978. 26

New York Times, 10 February 1983. 27

Washington Post, 11 April 1983. 28

The members of the central organization committee – Benjamin Meed, Sam

Bloch, Ernest Michel, Roman Kent, Norbert Wollheim, Hirsch Altusky, Fred

Diament, James Rapp, and Solomon Zynstein – had all been born in the 1910s

and 1920s. Michel, Kent, Wollheim, Diament, and Rapp were camp survivors,

and Meed, Bloch, Altusky and Zynstein had all survived ghettos. 29

“The Holocaust: A Gathering of Survivors,” Washington Post, 9 April 1983.


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13

place during the Gathering was a symbolic handing over of the keys to these

buildings.30

This meant that certain political pressures that surrounded the

campaign to create the Holocaust museum had an impact upon the Gathering as

well. In particular, planning for the museum had been marked by debates,

sometimes angry, concerning the very definition of the Holocaust and of

Holocaust survivors. The United States Holocaust Memorial Council, set up by

Congress in 1980 to raise funds for the museum, was under political pressure to

adopt a view of the Holocaust that went beyond Jewish victims to include all

those, Jews and non-Jews alike, who were systematically murdered inside the

concentration camps.31

While the Gathering was not directly organised by the

Memorial Council, these debates nonetheless had an impact on the event:

although the Gathering was an event dedicated to Jewish survivors, organisers

ensured that the definition of “survivor” was kept wide, and that non-survivor

family members, particularly children, were encouraged to attend.

Thus there was an emphasis, at the conference, on the children of

survivors. A special program of events was organised for children of survivors,

spearheaded by Menachem Rosensaft, head of the International Network of

Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, and himself the child of survivors who

was born in Bergen-Belsen DP camp immediately after the war.32

Of the 16,000

attendees at the meeting, an estimated 4000 were children of survivors – and they,

too, were in the midst of a process of coming to recognise themselves as a distinct

social group, a self-defined “generation”. Although children of survivors had

begun to form collectives in the mid-1970s, inspired and motivated in large part

by the growth of identity politics in the wake of the mass social movements of the

late 1960s, the publication of Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust:

Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors in 1979 accelerated this

process. By the time of the Gathering, there were hundreds of “second

generation” groups across North America, including a local Washington DC

group with nearly 300 members.33

A second-generation participant in the

30

Then-vice president George Bush Sr. officially handed the keys over to Elie

Wiesel, chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, during the

Gathering. See Washington Post, The Obligation to Remember, 46. 31

See note 1. 32

Rosensaft organized a similar program of events at the 1981 conference in

Jerusalem, and the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust

Survivors was formed out of networks established in Jerusalem. In this sense, the

Jerusalem Gathering was likely a more significant moment for children of

survivors than it was for child survivors. 33

Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and

Daughters of Survivors (New York, 1979). See also Washington Post, The


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conference, Jeanette Binstock, speaking to a journalist from the Washington Post,

recounted that two years previously she had begun to reconsider her own identity

as the child of a survivor, and this had prompted her to listen deeply, for the first

time, to her survivor father’s story. “Before,” she said, “I wondered how and if I

should tell my children about the war. Now that I really know what happened, it’s

a matter of necessity: I have to tell them.”34

Adult survivors were reaching old age, and their children were assuming

the mantle of the “second generation”. What, then, did this mean for child

survivors, who often felt excluded from the world of adult survivors, yet who did

not see themselves as belonging to the “second generation” (indeed, the “second

generation” was defined through having parents who survived, whereas many

child survivors had lost one or both of their parents)? Unlike the children of

survivors, in the early 1980s child survivors were only just beginning a process of

re-thinking the meanings of their memories to their then-current identities. Those

who attended the Gathering found in the event a moment of possibility that

generated both opportunity and discomfort. When survivors attending the

Gathering were encouraged to fill in a form recording their wartime experiences,

including how they had survived, the options offered (camp, ghetto, hideout,

forest) matched the experiences of most adult survivors, but did not quite

encompass those of child survivors, the majority of whom had survived not in

hideouts, but in hiding.35

Even in the event’s open approach towards the concept

of “survival”, a degree of exclusion reinforced, for child survivors, their non-

belonging.

Before turning to the oral histories of child survivors attending the

Gathering, it is worth placing a final concept, that of the “survivor”, in historical

context – for in 1983 it did not mean what it means now. Those who had survived

the war as adults, and particularly those who had survived the concentration

camps, often identified as “survivors”. The thousands of pages of written

testimony that attendees submitted at the Gathering attest to this: camp survivors,

in particular, often signed their submissions “A Holocaust Survivor”. However, to

be a “Holocaust survivor” was clearly an identity riddled with complexities and

uncertainties, and one that had an ambiguous significance in the public mind in

the early 1980s. As one of the event’s organisers observed in the week before the

Obligation to Remember, 34. It is interesting to note that, in the United States

(and possibly elsewhere), groups for children of survivors thus predated groups

for child survivors by nearly a decade. 34

Neil Henry, “The Children: Inheritors of a Painful Legacy”, reprinted in

Washington Post, The Obligation to Remember, 34. 35

USHMM, RG-02.002, “American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

collection.”


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Gathering, there was a sharp divide between the public image of survivors as

“shaven, starving people in striped suits,” and the reality of survivors’ productive

post-war lives.36

Implied in such comments was the fact that many survivors

(adult and child alike) felt that they struggled against a stigma attached to the

concept of “Holocaust survivor”. At the Gathering, Eva Fogelman, a doctoral

student in psychology who would go on to become a leading expert on

psychological issues relating to child survivors and children of survivors, noted

that some survivors had struggled to integrate into their local Jewish communities

after emigrating to the United States, because of this stigma: “the implication,”

she said, “is that they had done something wrong to live through it.”37

Child survivors in a moment of change

Edith Riemer (b. 1931 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany) survived the war

because she had been sent with the Kindertransport to England in 1939.38

Her

parents and her entire extended family were murdered in the genocide. At the

Gathering she learned, for the first time, what had become of her father after he

had been deported from Germany to the Gurs internment camp in the south of

France, by consulting a copy of historian Serge Klarsfeld’s Mémorial de la

déportation des Juifs de France – a ground-breaking, meticulous study that

detailed the fates of all 75,521 Jews deported from France.39

Reeling from this

discovery, Edith then had a provocative conversation with an older survivor:

36

Site organizer Lawrence Goldberg, quoted in the Washington Post, 9 April

1983. 37

Washington Post, The Obligation to Remember, 34. Fogelman’s work on the

psychological issues faced by children of survivors was ground-breaking. She was

among the first psychologists to organize therapy groups for children of survivors,

establishing the first such group in Boston in 1976. Her work became widely

known when it was discussed by journalist Helen Epstein; see Helen Epstein,

“Heirs of the Holocaust,” New York Times Magazine, 19 June 1977, 175. 38

On the Kindertransport, see in particular Andrea Hammel and Bea Lewkowicz,

eds., The Kindertransport to Britain 1938/39: New Perspectives (New York:

Rodopi, 2012). 39

Serge Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France (Paris,

1978). Copies of Klarsfeld’s book were available for consultation at the

Gathering, and many child survivors learned the fates of their parents for the first

time this way. In Riemer’s case, she had already known that her mother died

following a surgical operation in Gurs in early 1942 – but she learned for the first

time that her father stayed an additional six months in Gurs before being deported

to Auschwitz.


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“somebody said to me at this conference, ‘were you in a concentration camp?’

And I said no. And then they said ‘well then, you are not a survivor.’ And that

hurt. Because I have lost every single one of my family, I am the only one left.”40

Interviewed the day after these unsettling events, Edith’s interview

captured a child survivor at a moment of raw self-awareness. In this, Edith’s

experience had striking parallels with those of many other child survivors at the

Gathering. Their interviews often attest both to the shock of learning about the

fate of their parents (or other close relatives) for the first time through

publications like Klarsfeld’s, but simultaneously confronting a disconnect

between their own developing understanding of their childhood pasts, and others’

assessments of what it meant to be a child who had survived.

As Alessandro Portelli has argued, oral history tells us as much about the

“time of the telling” as it does about the “time of the event”: there is a complex

and dynamic relationship between the narration of remembered events, and the

self giving this narration in a specific historical context.41

The oral history

conduced at the 1983 Gathering shows it to have been a transformational “time of

the telling”. For many child survivor participants, the Gathering was the first

opportunity they had had to be in contact with so many others survivors, both

adult and child. As Edith Riemer’s testimony illustrates, these encounters could

be antagonistic, but the antagonism itself had a transformative potential. It forced

Edith, and others like her who gave similar testimony, to challenge some

dominant perspectives regarding who “qualified” as a survivor, and to begin to

assert a different reading of what it meant to survive. It also allowed interviewees

to approach and to narrate their memories in new ways, as they reframed their

childhood experiences in light of this new reading.

Child survivors were only too aware of the uncomfortable position they

occupied between adult survivors and the “second generation”. While the

Gathering afforded an opportunity to confront this position, the confrontation did

not necessarily take place vis-à-vis other participants: this could be an internal

conflict as much as an external one. Many child survivors, indeed, were not sure

what to call themselves in their interviews. It is worth noting that interviews with

child survivors from this collection were generally marked, when the collection

was first archived, with the subject heading “orphan”. Interviewers and archivists

clearly felt just as uncomfortable with the term “survivor” in these cases as

interviewees themselves did.

40

Interview with Edith Gerta Riemer, interviewer unspecified, 13 April 1983,

USHMM RG-50.119*0110. 41

Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of

Dialogue (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 185.


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Felicia Neufeld (b. 1934 in Berlin) referred to herself as “a child of non-

survivors” rather than a survivor in her own right – a nod to the gulf, in terms of

identity, between child survivors and children of survivors. She felt compelled to

begin her interview with her aunt’s story, rather than her own, because her aunt

had been in Auschwitz, had survived, but had never herself given an interview.

Felicia’s story of survival, however, was harrowing in its own right. In 1937, her

father had left Germany for Paris, and in 1938 at the age of four she joined him

there, leaving her mother in an increasingly precarious situation in Germany. Her

unemployed father resorted to “hustling for food”, and she spent her days alone.

One afternoon in 1942, when she was just short of eight years old, she came back

to their small apartment to learn from her playmates that her father had been

arrested – and had taken with him the only key to the apartment. Thenceforth,

Felicia found herself entirely at the mercy of strangers, and developed “a

consciousness that I think no child has the right to have.” She survived because

she received help from adults: first from the kind concierge of her building, then

from staff at an orthodox Jewish orphanage, and finally from a family who took

her in when the orphanage closed. She recalls being so lonely and frightened that

she took the only possession she had from her parents – a scarf that her mother

had given her – and ripped it up and ate it piece by piece, “as if to hold on to this

mother that I had not seen since I was four years old.” Felicia observed, as did

many other child survivors, that the very meaning of survival for children was

often intimately bound to the agency of their rescuers, recalling that “survival was

a matter of luck, occasionally of planning, and in my case of the good – no, good

will will never translate it enough – of the giving, sharing of other people’s lives,

and I mean their lives at stake, their heads on the chopping block.”42

If the Gathering prompted child survivors to re-assess their childhoods and

their relationship with the concept of survival, it also forced them to confront how

scarcely they knew their own pasts. This was particularly true of those who had

been orphaned and who had been so young as to have no firm, clear memories of

their wartime experiences. The parents of Jacques Fein (b. Jacques Karpik in Paris

42

Interview with Felicia Neufeld, interviewer unspecified, 11 April 1983,

USHMM, RG-50.119*0099. Ms. Neufeld died in 2011. Her rescuer, Mme Renée

Vérité, was a cook at the orphanage where Felicia was placed, run by the Jewish

underground organization Rue Amelot. When the orphanage was closed, the

children went into hiding, and Mme Vérité took a number of children from the

orphanage to her home in Bienfay (Somme), where she hid them for the duration

of the war. In 1995 she was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous among the

Nations. See Yad Vashem’s website for further details:

http://db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language=en&itemId=4018052

(accessed 1 November 2016).


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in 1938), aware of the danger they were in, had placed Jacques and his younger

sister Annette with the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), a Jewish aid

organisation responsible for rescuing thousands of children in France during the

war.43

The OSE, in turn, placed Jacques and Annette with a Catholic family, the

Bocahuts, who cared for the children for the remainder of the occupation period.

Jacques and his sister then returned to the care of the OSE after the war, before

being adopted by an American couple, the Feins, and emigrating to the United

States in 1948. His parents were murdered in Auschwitz. After the Gathering,

Jacques began an intense process of trying to learn more about his early years, his

parents, and the family that cared for him, but in 1983 he found himself

confronting the paucity of his own knowledge, recalling that “I was born in ’38

and all I know is from papers that I had, that my mother died in ’41 and my father

died in ’43. I really don’t know the mechanics of how I was saved, except that

more than likely the OSE people helped me find a family. I forgot their names

completely but I think the name Bocahut, something like that, you know, sticks in

my mind. I had a sister also, I’m virtually positive that she’s my natural sister,

because I’m never positive really, absolutely positive of anything. I don’t have

anybody to relate to.”44

Interviews such as Jacques’s caught child survivors as they began to think

through what this thin knowledge of their pasts might mean to their present

identities. Some indicated that they had already tentatively began this process

before the Gathering, but the interviews give ample evidence to suggest that the

process was unfolding in real time at the conference, as child survivors were

given what was, for many, their first opportunity to share their testimony. Here,

we are reminded that oral history not only captured this emotional and

transformational process as it was happening, but also helped to drive it: being

invited to speak freely and reflect publicly on their lives had dramatic

repercussions for child survivors’ grasp of the meaning and value of their life

43

On the OSE, see Katy Hazan, Les orphelins de la Shoah (Paris: Belles Lettres,

2000). The OSE was also responsible for caring for orphaned child survivors after

the war, running dozens of orphanages across France. Among child survivors at

the Gathering, there was a high percentage who had either been born in or passed

through France (readers will note that most of the interviewees quoted here fall

into this category). Rather than being a coincidence, this suggests a common

trajectory: French aid organizations such as the OSE were more likely than others

to assist their wards in emigrating to the U.S. in the postwar period, and all the

interviewees quoted in this article emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1940s or early

1950s. 44

Interview with Paul Kassy, Jacques Fein, and Felice Zimmern Stokes,

interviewer unspecified, 13 April 1983, USHMM RG-50.477*1361.


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stories. It helped that the interviews were largely spontaneous and unrehearsed:

interviewees did not know in advance that volunteers would be recording

testimony at the conference. The result could be intense discomposure. This is

reflected in Jacques’s testimony: as he explained in his interview, he had only

recently begun to see that elements in his adult life – his divorce, for example –

were linked to his childhood, and in response he had begun to rethink his adult

identity, and even his name. He recalled that “my name was changed. I adopted

my American first name, Jack. And it wasn’t until very, very recently that I went

back to Jacques at different times. In terms of belonging or feeling close, you are

just not there. I don’t think…you know, I don’t think it will ever be…as I said a

few minutes ago, being divorced, to me, just…it’s a repetition of being

uprooted.”45

Jacques added at this point in his interview that one factor that made this

revisiting of his life history possible was the simple fact of meeting other child

survivors at the Gathering. In particular, on the first day of the Gathering, he met

a fellow child survivor, Felice Zimmern Stokes (b. 1939 in Walldürn, Germany),

who had lived in the OSE orphanage at Taverny, to the north of Paris – just as he

had. Although they did not remember each other, in meeting, they were able to

help each other reconstruct elements of orphanage life. As was the case for

Jacques, Felice had been placed in hiding with a Catholic family in the French

countryside, and returned to an OSE orphanage after the war, with her older sister

Beate. Both of her parents were murdered in Auschwitz. Like many other child

survivors, she had been apprehensive about coming to the Gathering, observing

that “the first day, I was very nervous and anxious about this Gathering: what’s it

going to be like? I won’t know anybody, because everybody else’s story is better

than mine. I didn’t go through a camp. Do I really belong here?” Later in her

interview, she expanded on this, revealing how difficult she felt it was to bear

witness to her experiences, in large part because she felt that, not having been in a

camp, she was excluded from the ranks of survivors. The following passage is

from a moment in the interview at which Felice seems caught off guard by her

emotional discomposure:

It’s been very hard, people don’t understand, and it’s very hard for me to

talk about it. I don’t belong, I didn’t go to a camp, I didn’t suffer in that

way, I don’t have a number to show the pain, but see, I [here she begins to

cry] I never had the parents. Why did they go? And there was nothing to

show for it. […] I couldn’t bring myself to go to the World Gathering [in

Jerusalem in 1981], because I felt that I’m not a survivor, I didn’t go

through a camp, but then I thought: I am a survivor, in my own way, my

45

Note here that … indicates a pause, while […] indicates omission.


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parents died, my whole family died, besides my sister everyone else is

gone.46

After the Gathering: forming a generational identity

Six years after the 1983 American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors,

Jacques Fein gave an interview to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust

Testimony. This interview not only stressed the importance of the 1983 Gathering

as a life-changing moment for Jacques, but also provided contextual detail that

allows us to see why the Gathering had been so important to him. In it, he

explained that he had begun thinking hard about his past the year before,

prompted by what he called a “mid-life crisis”. He recalled that, through the

1960s and 1970s, “people always asked me what my parents were like, and I

didn’t know anything,” a void at the centre of his life that had begun to feel like

“an obsession” by the early 1980s. In 1982, Jacques wrote to his sister, who was

then living in Jerusalem, to ask whether she had any information about their

parents that he did not have. He was shocked when she sent back two family

photographs. He recalled that, after receiving them, “the issues about where I

came from really started coming into focus. Although it was happening in the

previous five to ten years, it was 1982 that really…that was it.” Wanting to

connect to others in this situation, he went with a friend to a survivors’ group, but

“they were all camp survivors, and it was really difficult to relate to them, and for

them to relate to us. Because from our point of view, we didn’t have any of that,

and from their point of view, we didn’t really suffer.”

This motivated Jacques to attend the 1983 Gathering, where he observed

that most attendees were camp survivors, and “there were very few people like

myself.” Nonetheless, he recalled that two pivotal events took place at the

Gathering: the first was his meeting with Felice Zimmern Stokes (and with other

people who had spent time in OSE homes), and the second was the discovery of

information about his parents’ deportation in Serge Klarsfeld’s Mémorial: “I met

someone who asked about my parents, and I didn’t know anything, so this person

took me to see the Klarsfeld book Memorial to the Jews Deported from France.

The person said ‘do you know when they were sent?’, but I didn’t know anything

except their last names. I went through every convoy until I eventually found the

46

Felice Zimmern Stokes was interviewed twice at the Gathering: once in a joint

interview with Jacques Fein and another attendee helped by the OSE, Paul Kassy,

and again on her own. These quotes are taken from her individual interview:

Felice Zimmern Stokes, interviewer unspecified, 12 April 1983, USHMM, RG-

50.119*0137.


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name Karpik. I found my father on page 38. […] That was one of the emotional

moments of my life, just seeing them on paper.”47

The Gathering thus acted as a catalyst towards rethinking identity in two

key ways, for Jacques and for other child survivors. First, it brought him his first

concrete knowledge about the fate of his parents, and launched a period in his life

during which he made great efforts to learn more about both their deaths and his

own early life. In the year following the Gathering, Jacques travelled to France to

meet the family who had rescued him during the war, whose name, remarkably,

was indeed Bocahut – a major clue to his past that he had only vaguely

remembered the year before. He also managed to obtain his OSE case records,

which provided a wealth of factual information about his years in OSE

orphanages. Second, the Gathering opened an opportunity to forge what would

become lasting relationships with other child survivors. The conference made this

possible in practical terms, as attendees were able to gather lists of others with

similar backgrounds and who lived within a given region. In a more expansive

sense, the conference was a moment during which many child survivors

recognised, in meeting each other, the collective aspects of their life histories. In

1984, Jacques was one of the founders of a group for child survivors in the

Washington-Baltimore area. He recalled that “the ’83 conference was the catalyst

[for the group], because we got a bunch of names. But clearly, it was going to

happen, because there were other people feeling the same way, people in their

mid-40s starting to have their mid-life crises, because all I can tell you is that

people in their mid-40s and early 50s who have lived with this…the best medicine

is to get together and talk about it and somehow start to open up. To meet people

who have had the same experience. You don’t have to explain to our group.”

In the wake of the 1983 Gathering, hundreds of similar groups for child

survivors formed across the United States, Canada, the U.K., Australia and

elsewhere, highlighting the transnational impacts of these changes across the

Anglophone world.48

If the oral histories gathered at the conference reflected a

47

Interview with Jacques F., interviewed by Myra Katz and Froma Willen, 24

November 1991, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony, Yale

University Archives, HVT-862. All of Jacques Fein’s subsequent quotations in

this section are from this interview. 48

See, for example, the Shoah Visual History Foundation interview with Litzi

Hart for an account of the establishment of the first of these groups in Australia in

1987, or the interview with Joanna Millan for an account of the formation of the

first parallel organization in Great Britain around the same time. Interview with

Felizitas (Litzi) Hart, 27 March 1995, interviewer Vanessa Ring, Shoah

Foundation Visual History Archive, 1224; interview with Joanna Millan, 15

February 1998, Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, 37960.


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moment in which child survivors were first starting to reconsider the relationship

between their pasts and their present identities as individuals, those carried out in

the years following reflected the shift towards a collective understanding of a

distinct “child survivor” generation. Like Jacques Fein, Felice Zimmern Stokes

reflected, in two later interviews, on how the Gathering had cemented a sense of

belonging to a wider group.49

For her, this process took somewhat longer than it

did for Jacques: it was not until the first International Gathering of Hidden

Children, held in New York in May 1991, that she joined a child survivors’ group:

“we formed a group, and we became very close, very attached. We recounted our

experience, we talked about it, and that’s how it helped.”50

When interviewed in

1993, Felice reiterated her frustration concerning the dismissal of child survivors,

but with far more confidence than she had in 1983, using reported speech to

encourage the listener to imagine both the dialogue and its emotional impact:

There was this Holocaust conference. I questioned whether I should go

because I’d never been in a camp, I have nothing to show for it, I wasn’t in

this camp or that camp and I used to want to have a number [tattooed on my

arm] so I could show people the pain. I remember saying that I have nothing

to show for what I went through, I have no number, they used to say “you

were a child, what do you know? You don’t remember.” This is one of the

things they used to tell me at the conference, “oh, you don’t remember.”

This is why the [1991] Hidden Child conference was good: there was a pain

there, but a different kind of pain. The pain of loss.51

If the “generational” aspects of this sense of belonging were implied in

Felice’s narrative, other child survivors made the link overtly. Jacqueline Rosay

(b. Jacqueline Rozencwajg in 1938 in Paris) had escaped into neutral Switzerland

with the help of the French underground in 1943, and had spent the remainder of

49

Felice Zimmern Stokes has given interviews to both the Yale Fortunoff

collection and the Shoah Visual History Archive: see interview with Felice Z.,

interviewed by Joni Sue Blinderman, 30 December 1992, Fortunoff Visual

Archive for Holocaust Testimony, Yale University Archives, HVT-2244;

interview with Felice Stokes, interviewed by Rosalie Franks, 2 February 1998,

Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, 38777. 50

Interview with Felice Stokes, Shoah Foundation VHA, 38777. 51

Interview with Felice Z., Fortunoff collection, HVT-2244. Felice also attended

the second International Gathering of Hidden Children in Jerusalem in 1993. On

the significance of the use of reported speech, see Deborah Tannen, Talking

Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).


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the war with a Swiss family. Her parents survived, but she did not resume living

with them until 1948, after having accidentally been placed in an orphanage.

Jacqueline recalls that attending the Gathering in Washington dramatically

changed her own relationship with her past and with her parents’ pasts. Her

description of this transformation marks a particularly emotional moment in her

interview: “[Attending the Gathering] was like a great burden was lifted from my

shoulders. I felt such pride in being a Jew and [here she starts to cry] found such

strength from the people I met there. […] [Following this] I felt the need to meet

with my own generation, I felt so alone, and you really feel the lack of people in

your own age group, because so many were killed.”52

In 1985, Jacqueline began working with others to set up a group for child

survivors in New York. Like Felice, she also attended and was deeply moved by

the first Hidden Child conference in 1991. As was the case for Felice, this 1991

gathering marked a turning point for Jacqueline: she recalled that “it kind of

brought everything together, because I’ve been working on this since 1983, and I

feel I have now an understanding of how and in what way it formed me and

influenced my behaviour, my beliefs, my values, and it also gave me a greater

understanding of my parents: what they went through, their losses, their

experiences, their relationship to me.” As Jacqueline’s testimony suggests, she –

and many others – took a number of steps between the early 1980s and the early

1990s that fed into the development of a distinct, collective generational identity.

The sense of being part of a collective experience in turn had profound

consequences for individuals and for families. As Jacqueline suggested, this took

work: psychic, emotional, intellectual, personal and collective. It was not enough

for these child survivors to have shared the formative experience of having

survived the genocide: to develop a sense of generational belonging, they had to

work towards this consciously and collectively in their middle age. They had to

learn to represent themselves as a distinct generation, and to use narratives of

survival to frame their own life stories. Through this process they altered cultural

representations broadly: we are now all familiar with the term “child Holocaust

survivor”.

Conclusion

Generations, Alistair Thomson writes, are historically contingent: “They are

forged by shared experiences and emergent generational awareness in youth.

They are fashioned and refashioned in memory by individuals who draw upon

52

Interview with Jacqueline R., interviewed by Dana Kline and Lucille B. Ritro,

13 June 1992, Fortunoff Visual Archive for Holocaust Testimony, Yale

University Archives, HVT-1537.


ISSN 1923-0567

24

generational identities to help them make sense of their lives. They are enacted

and reproduced through collective assertions of generational interests and needs,

and they are consolidated by collective representation of a common past and of a

common generational identity.”53

Thomson rightly reminds us that early shared

experiences are a key component of “generations”, but they are not the only one.

Members of a self-defined generation must have a subjective sense of collective

belonging, and the work of forging this generational identity is itself deeply

shaped by its own historical moment. This article has demonstrated that this

moment of creation and consolidation can occur many years after the formative

events that are often assumed to be the basis of generational understanding. While

formative events are important, a shared process of remembering and narrating is

more so, fired into action by a historical context that can emerge decades after the

fact.

For child survivors, the formation of a generational consciousness was not

just about claiming the identity of “survivors” for themselves – it was about

exploring what it meant to survive in a fundamentally different way. Testimony

such as Jacques Fein’s and Felice Zimmern Stokes’s suggests that such

explorations sometimes predated the event, but there can be little doubt that the

event accelerated and crystalised this reconfiguration. The Gathering provided a

context and a moment in which child survivors began to fit their own life stories

into a broader, changing story of who a Holocaust survivor could be, and what

dimensions survival could assume. The historical moment of the Gathering, in the

early 1980s, was the watershed point in and after which many child survivors –

then in mid-life – began to see themselves as part of a distinct generational group.

Oral history is a powerful tool for shedding light on such processes of

generation building. In the interviews recorded at the 1983 Gathering, we hear

child survivor participants negotiating a moment of emotional dislocation and a

sense of non-belonging, but we equally hear them taking steps towards rethinking

the very meaning of their memories. In later reflections on the Gathering,

interviewees offer insights into how the 1983 event opened up opportunities to

forge inter-personal bonds, to reframe personal and collective narratives, and to

engage in a different reading of a common past. These later interviews also shed

light on how this process unfolded and was maintained over a period of years and

even decades, allowing us an intimate window onto how “generations” are

socially constructed by committed individuals and groups working in historically

contingent circumstances.

53 Alistair Thomson, “Australian Generations?” 85.

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